From Output to Outcomes: My key takeaways from HubSpot GROW 2026

Last week, I attended the HubSpot Grow Conference in Sydney to learn about how they see marketing technology developing and what it means for marketers. While the hype around AI doesn’t appear to be slowing, the conversation does seem to be shifting. AI Leaders are moving from individual LLM experiments and are focusing on how they can use AI to drive Institutional Growth.

The goal for 2026 isn’t just to increase “output” – it’s to drive outcomes. AI can help us break down some of the barriers to improved relevance and personalisation, but we need to be clear about where we want to apply our human focus and how we can enable AI to help with the rest.

As CEO of Marketing Cube, I wanted to share the highlights that resonated most closely with how we are helping our clients build their marketing strategies this year.

Three men smiling at a conference posing in front of an orange gradient wall with a quote; all wear lanyards with badges.

(L-R) Adrian Jones – CEO, Thomas Walsh – Marketing Technology & Automation Engineer and Arnon Miniano – Partner Specialist – Hubspot (ANZ)

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HubSpot GROW 2026 Sydney ICC - Main Stage

My top key takeaways from GROW 2026 this year?

1. Unifying Marketing, Sales and Service

AI is dissolving traditional silos, blurring the lines between Marketing and Sales and Marketing and Customer Success.

We’ve been talking about inter-departmental alignment for a long time, but AI has the potential to help teams provide a seamless omnichannel customer experience powered by shared data and automated intelligence. The right hand can know what the left hand is doing.

2. Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)

The most insightful session of the conference was Aja Frost’s session on AEO. AI models look for snippets that best answer questions, rather than focusing on page authority, and they place much more emphasis on recency. This session focused on the evolving landscape of how your business is found, and how providing structured content, unique statistics, and frequent updates helps ensure AI models trust and prioritise your website to drive citations and mentions.

How to win at AEO?

Think about the questions people ask and how you provide context-rich content to help answer them
Use more easily recognisable headings as questions and consider including robust FAQ sections.
AI values recently updated content more than ever – so refresh your key pages frequently.
Support your AI authority across multiple channels as well as your site – for example, LinkedIn, Reddit, and YouTube.

HubSpot provides tools and analytics to help you do this, but as it’s a concept that every marketer needs to be across.

3. Turn your Data Architecture into a Growth Engine

In the Data & Governance session, a great analogy was made between AI and Formula 1 racing and space rockets. Everyone sees the car flying around the track, or a rocket launch into space, but few people consider all the teamwork and hard work behind the scenes to make it happen.

Your data is the fuel – and to turn your AI into a growth engine, we must focus on 2 clear areas

A clean taxonomy and data strategy to identify and classify your key data sets; and
Set clear rules and permissions for how AI accesses and uses your data.

4. Agentic Workflows

The Hubspot team went through a number of Agents in action, and how they help specific parts of the funnel:

Demand & Inbound Agents that help qualify and progressively profile leads
Prospecting Agents that operate in the “Engage” phase to coordinate multi-channel outreach
Customer Agents that provide support at scale to help manage more basic enquiries

HubSpot GROW 2026 Sydney ICC - Exhibitor Hall

In closing

The research is clear: 3 in 5 marketers are already being assisted by AI, but only 1 in 5 say it has fundamentally changed their role. HubSpot is helping its customers to fundamentally change this in 2026.

If you’re wondering how you should be moving from individual AI tool experiments to incorporating AI into your growth strategy and driving outcomes, let’s talk.